Adam Erhart breaks down how YETI built a cult-like following by starting in niche fishing communities and investing heavily in brand identity. The cooler company focused on core customers first, used user-generated content to amplify their story, and created what Pauly Dari calls a brand heat shield through sustained marketing investment.
If you want to build a brand that customers love, then you need to make sure you're doing a few things right, like building a community around your business, staying focused on your customers at all times, and not being afraid to stand up, stand out and stand for something.
Be the best, be the worst, but never be the middle. You know, just don't be boring.
In today's attention economy with so many other brands, businesses and messages competing for your customers attention, if you're boring, you're broke. I'm Adam Erhart and today I want to unpack a recent episode of Connections, the show for marketers on Salesforce + where Yeti CMO Pauly Dari talks about some key insights into what Yeti is doing to build a long term sustainable brand and relationship with their customers. I'm going to take some of the bigger picture ideas he shares and translate them into proven and profitable marketing strategies, tactics and frameworks that you can use right now in order to build a brand that lasts, make a deeper connection with your customers and build what Polly calls a heat shield around your business. But before we start, if you want to check out the full episode, you can right after this on Salesforce Plus. It's completely 100% free to watch and there are a ton of other great episodes on there as well. So I'll make sure to put a link down in the descriptions for you to check out right after this video. For now, let's start unpacking one of the most important brand building concepts out there. How to build a loyal and dedicated cult like following for your brand. Despite what it sounds like, building a cult brand has nothing to do with starting a cult. Well, there's a relief and everything to do with attracting and connecting to people who share a common love or passion for a certain value, lifestyle, attitude or behavior associated with your business. For example, I love marketing, so I talk about marketing, create marketing content. Try to tell anybody who will listen about just how great marketing is. Excuse me sir, Would you like to learn about how marketing can help you grow your business? And Yeti did this by being clear and focusing on the two things that matter most when it comes to building a long term and sustainable brand, the their core customer and building community.
It seems like you've built a cult brand rather than a fad brand. Is that something you talk about internally?
I think we talk about it for two reasons. A fad is a short lived spike and while that may be really satisfying on the short term, it's not how you build a brand or a company for the long haul and you always have to protect your core customer and community. And if you do that well, others find you right and will follow you in.
The good news is that building a cult like following is a whole lot easier than it sounds, as it all really comes down to authenticity and being true to your business and your vision and your customers. When you do this, you naturally start to attract more people just like you and repel bad fits and problem customers that you wouldn't want to work with anyway. And it builds a heat shield that protects you when bad things happen as how much you can weather is dependent on how much you've put into your brand.
So what is a brand heat shield?
There are some companies that don't invest in brand, so when something happens, they're in trouble. A brand heat shield is how well you can weather that storm. Brands aren't perfect, companies aren't perfect, people aren't perfect. But with brands that have great heat shield, there's give and how much can you weather is totally dependent on how much you've put into brand.
A strong brand is what allows some businesses to grow consistently regardless of the economy, allows you to charge top dollar and have people practically beg you to give you their cash. And the best brands know how to make their product, but more importantly, their brand become a part of your life. More than that though, it becomes a part of you, or at least the way you think about yourself. It's more than making funny ads, flashy graphics, or hyped up product launches. It's about making the brand part of your identity. And the very best marketing does this while at the same time bringing together a group of people who also share the same values and lifestyles and attitudes and behaviors. And that's what community building is all about. Building a community around your business doesn't have to be complicated. Sure, there are tactics and tricks and hacks you can use. I'll share those with you in just a minute. But what's really important is the strategy, the attitude and the mindset behind all of this. Which comes down to asking, how can you be of service?
How can you be of service? How can you be really true and help those people do more of what they love?
What I found most interesting here though, was how Yeti didn't come out of the gate swinging trying to go after everyone everywhere, which would have made them a commodity, but instead started with a small customer segment and really focused on giving them the best experience possible.
I wanna talk about the vibrant brand community that you've built at YETI built it really fast. How did you do that?
Community is the cornerstone of yeti. We started with the fishing communities down the coast of Texas and Florida because we built a product that was made for people to fish longer. So you put a lot of focus into that community because they were really embracing us. We started to see other communities embrace the product and we still to this day follow that. We don't create the tracks, we follow them. We see where our product pops up and what communities embraced the product. So we started to see it pop up in the outdoor world, in the climb world, in snowboarding, into the barbecue world. And now we're into this world of surf and skate, which the product found its way there. When the product found its way, we followed and invested in the community.
A good way to start building more of a community around your brand is simply to start identifying the platforms and places that your ideal target audience is present and active on this. Then go there, listen and learn. Then engage by being curious, asking questions, and providing helpful content. You can take this a step further by creating an online group or community to help bring people together around your topic. And you can amplify all of this by adopting a User Generated Content or UGC strategy that encourages customers to share their personal experiences with your brand or business. At the end of the day though, do whatever you have to do in order to share and tell the stories of the people that love you most. So to help you do that, let's take a look at brand building content now. Content marketing is one of the most important ingredients to building a strong brand today.
How do you approach brand storytelling? Does the community help you create custom content?
We invest a lot in our content. We love the places that our product lives and we love the characters. And all we wanted to do was tell the story of the people and the places and they're often stories that aren't told and so we want to tell it.
Your audience wants more content. The social media algorithms want more content. I personally would like to see see you make more and better content. But quantity alone isn't enough to succeed in the content game today, as the demand for quality content is also increasing. So if your content isn't working as well as you were hoping for, it's likely because it's either unrelated or unappealing. Unrelated content means that the words, images, and overall messages that the business is using are irrelevant, just not that important. Saying something that people don't really care that much about, and trying to sell something in a way that doesn't resonate with the actual actual pains, problems, fears and frustrations of the customer. Unappealing content is simply a message that's packaged wrong, or in other words, it's boring, forgettable, and it just blends in with everything else. The solution to both of these problems comes down to number one, knowing your audience and how your business helps them, and number two, being strategic about the content you're creating, which can happen by planning things ahead of time and also by staying plugged into the community. But we've only just scratched the surface, and there are a ton more great takeaways and lessons you can learn not only from this episode of Connections, but the entire series where we're talking with CMOs from every industry. And you can stream it now completely free on Salesforce plus, just by clicking the link in the descriptions below. This video and for more actionable takeaways to help you grow your business, make sure to check out the video I've got linked up right here, so make sure to check that out now and I'll talk to you again soon.
